Sociology and colonialism: Beyond Europe

The title of a Professor of the sociology of Emigrant Norbert Elias brought it in England, but in Africa. After his Retirement in Leicester, he worked from 1962 to 1964 at the University College of Ghana. In the newly independent West African country, Elias led an extensive project for the investigation of the social impact of involuntary resettlement for large dam on the Volta river, the flagship project of the young Ghanaian.

many other sociologists have, in the period of late colonialism and early independence in the French and British colonies, especially in Africa cast. The later most famous representative of this group is Pierre Bourdieu. The studied philosopher attended the Paris Promotion in Algeria during the bloody decolonization war, his military service and remained after the soldiers time to research on the Transformation of the urban and rural world. In particular, the Berber societies are found to be of interest. He is operating under the conditions of war intensive and often risky field of research. With the support of a small group of collaborators, he carried out two large surveys. One was devoted to the concept of work in the urban environment, the other workers observed the “uprooted” farmers, which he stored in the set up by the French Resettlement. For the French expulsion policy, Bourdieu found sharp criticism: He called it a destruction process. In his later, highly varied OEuvre, he always took back to the North African country, such as in the famous “outline of a theory of practice of the Kabyle society.”

The activities of sociologists in the “colonial field” in the history of the subject is, however, hardly present. George Steinmetz, a sociologist at the University of Michigan, even speaks of a disciplinary amnesia, soon after the end of colonialism. In the current Overviews on the sociology in France and England, or even in special studies of the history of large social surveys, instructions to colonial contexts were missing to a large extent. Far is the trend, the beginning of sociology as a discipline only in the early sixties to be recognised to be widespread in these two countries also. Steinmetz, however, stands well for the two major European colonial powers of the material realm, the rise of colonial sociology after the Second world war, after (“Sociology and Colonialism in the British and French Empires, 1945-1965”, in: Journal of Modern History, Bd. 89, issue 3, September 2017 / The University of Chicago Press).

by no means a peaceful co-existence

The boundaries between sociology and anthropology or social anthropology were often blurred. An English science writer, noted in the mid-fifties, that the old split – sociologists take care of the “modern”, anthropologists of the “primitive” societies – obsolete. A peaceful co-existence could not, of course, be the speech. Many of the younger scientists saw in sociology a kind of avant-garde, a discipline of great change, politically less compromised, while in their eyes the social anthropology seemed to be your existence to lose permission. You have to thank, Steinmetz cites contemporary voices, rise of the colonialism, and will go, at least in its traditional Form, with him. In pushing for independence, the colonies of Africa, insisted local intellectuals also pointed out that their companies should now also be explored by sociologists. “Colonial sociologists” covered politically a broad spectrum, from sharp critics to apologists of the colonial system.

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